A Convention of Clowns. ReallyI came to St. Louis yesterday afternoon and stopped by my hotel to get check in and eat lunch before heading off to a meeting with members of the Meramec English Department. I was a bit tired, a little groggy, and encumbered of the usual stress that comes from being in airport, where every one is a suspected terrorist and treated accordingly so.
I trudged off the shuttle, but as I made way to the registration desk, I was passed by a clown. A real clown, with baggy clown, a red clown nose, purple fuzzy clown hair and with an oversized clown flower in her oversized clown jacket. And coming towards me, from the opposite directions, were two more clowns, chatting, checking the time. And to my left, seated in the lobby couches, hunched over a something I could see, but conversing away like three business executives planning a presentation, were yet more clowns.
And they all had badges. I'd stumbled into a clown convention.
And just the site it of it all, with the juxtaposition of so much color and clown clothes on people who were being, well, so convention-like, rather than clown like, was better than a seeing a clown in performance mode. It was wonderfully funny.
And so I felt better, just by the sight of it all.
24 Hour War News Coverage: No News, but Plenty of NoiseSo look at cable news. Well don't look, it will drive you batty. Because news is rare, facts are few, and worst of all, the perspectives are bowlderized and laced with hot air and schmaltz. Speculation replaces second guessing; anchors ask air-heard questions. And visuals? You see a tank go by. You see a green tinted explosion. You see gold bathroom fixtures.
But what are you seeing? Really, it's a kind of parade, in somber voices, of a one long march to Bagdhad. It's one sanitized war we're getting. It's a painless war, except for the families who've lost sons and daughters, fathers and mothers, or for those who've been wounded. And those views are drenched in the flag, in words and phrases like, "hero," "ultimate sacrifice," or "brave." And those things are true enough, but they really don't get at the cost of being a hero, of making an ultimate sacrifice. Nor do those words, with the corresponding images and segment music, in the instant eulogoy and cliched rituals of televised loss (grief in a minute for a minute, but first this word from our sponsers) ever get at the loss of our humanity.
This war is too clean. It's too palatable to too many. People are dying and suffering, horribly. But that's white washed. It's too sanitized.
And the 24 hour war coverage of cable news makes it worse -- in large part because very often they have no news. So they cover the war like it's a football game. Only, in a football game, announcers and analyst at least pretend to be neutral and critique both sides; and try to show the whole game. No, this war coverage has made news invisible -- since if everything is news, there really in no news. There's mostly noise.
And too, the Iraqi's are invisible. We primarily see and hear where troops are, what they bombed, where they advanced, and their rationales and strategiec goals for bombing and advancing on those things. But we don't see, or hear much from those who've been advanced upon. We don't hear much from those who've been liberated.
This is war whose images are, for the most part acontextual, without a clear picture of wars ugliness, less we disturb the sensibilities of the cable news viewer, and without perspective. We get plenty of jabbering on the strategy, with ex-generals doing their John Madden thing, but no cohesive and complete view. Sure that may be impossible, but there doesn't seem to be much of an attempt at that as the news channels whip slim snippets of info into a fluff of blather.
So while embedded reporters might in fact be helping to keep the war as clean as possible, but the coverage is also obscuring the fact that war is still an ugly affair.
We need to see the costs of war, to viscerally know it.
Yes it would be upsetting, but war should be upsetting. We certainly don't need 24 hour news stations pretending to cover a war when all they're really doing is cover the hometeams progress. They're confusing this with Olympics coverage.
Classic ReaderHere's a pretty cool site, that was passed on to me from a colleague at work. It's an interesting experiment in a (so far) free online reader of classic (aka public domain) texts. Registering at the site is easy; providing email is optional, so you don't have to worry about spam and marketing materials. Registering creates an account on the site so you can write and store annotations on the texts. If you're interested in this kind of stuff for distance education, or computer-based classrooms, or just to see an alternative form that digital publishing might take, give this site a look-see:
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FYI:
http://www.classicreader.com/ At this site you can read, search, and annotate great works of literature by authors such as Dickens, Tolstoy, Shakespeare, and many others. The collection currently contains 743 books and 1041 short stories by 211 authors. New works are added to the collection on a regular basis, many at the suggestion of readers. The works are split into seven categories: fiction, nonfiction, children, poetry, Shakespeare, short stories and drama.
